In the field of speech recognition, the recognition of dynamic slot values, which include proper names such as personal names, street names, restaurant names, etc., is a key problem, as the recognizers rely on the accurate recognition of proper names to understand the intentions for the users. In some domains, such as the media or audio domain, the proper names could be very long, for example, a song name, an audio book name or a movie name. In such cases, people do not always use the full proper names. Partial names may be used to refer to their corresponding entities when the names are long. In spoken dialog applications, partial names tend to be used instead of the full names. At least one empirical user study shows that at least 25% of proper names are partial names. For example, a user might say “play the song ‘one last dance’” instead of using the full song name “play the song ‘Just One Last Dance’”. While in the user's private song database (e.g. the USB or MP3 from the user) or the public song database, only full names are stored. In such situation, only the transcriptions of the full names are available and incorporated into the speech recognizer.
If the user says some partial name as in the example, the recognizer cannot recognize it correctly because it does not have the information of partial proper names. On the other hand, if the user is required to speak only the full name, it is less natural and will have negative impact on the user experience. Therefore, how to correctly recognize these partial names is an important topic. Compared to the recognition of full names, little attention has been put on the recognition of partial names. Consequently, systems and methods for improving the recognition of partial names in speech recognition systems would be beneficial.